People driving along
Highway 205 on their way
to Dinosaur Valley State
Park just outside of scenic Glen
Rose,Texas, are often surprised to
encounter the Creation Evidence
Museum, located just a few hundred
yards before the park's
entrance (Figures 1, 2). The popular
museum consists of a small
group of trailers and a larger building
that advertises itself as a "scientifically
chartered museum." The museum's founder is Carl Baugh, a
Baptist preacher, archaeologist,and
Trinity Broadcasting Network personality
who uses the museum to discredit evolution by claiming
that people lived contemporaneously
with dinosaurs. Baugh began
his excavations along the nearby
Paluxy River on March 15, 1982,
and two days later announced discoveries
of human and dinosaur
tracks having "unparalleled historic
significance".

In the museum, visitors watch a
40-minute Creation in Symphony
video in which Baugh describes
his story of creation that includes
water's being sprayed 70 miles
into the air and God's stretching
the "space fabric" to a point where
faraway stars exploded. Baugh, a
young-earth creationist, claims that
evolution offers no explanation for
our existence. Baugh's creationism,
on the other hand, provides
hope and a happier ending. The
museum, which was established in
1984, supports a variety of
research programs, including expeditions
that claim to have found living
pterodactyls in New Guinea.

Museum officials claim that the
fossilized human footprints displayed
in the Museum were made
in what people have been "educated"
to believe are 113-million-year–old deposits of limestone in nearby Dinosaur Valley State Park.
Baugh claims to have excavated
almost 100 footprints and 475
dinosaur footprints. Researchers in
nearby Dinosaur Valley State Park
have found thousands of dinosaur
tracks, but no contemporaneous
human footprints.

One of the largest footprints on
display at the Creation Evidence
Museum — the 14" (36 cm)-long
"Burdick Track" — was found by
the energetic Clifford Burdick
(1894–1992), a founder of the
Deluge Society, one of America's
first creationist groups. Burdick
went to Glen Rose (about 50 miles
southwest of Fort Worth) late in
1949, and in 1950 published an
article titled "When giants roamed
the earth" in the Seventh-Day
Adventist magazine Signs of the
Times. In that article, Burdick proclaimed
that the Paluxy tracks were
made by humans and that they
therefore refute evolution.
Burdick's article used out-of-context
quotes to suggest that famed
fossil-hunter Roland Bird (who
went to Glen Rose in 1938 to investigate
the tracks) had excavated the
tracks and believed that they were
made by humans.

Footprints from the Paluxy site
were subsequently featured in The
Genesis Flood, a book by Henry
Morris and John Whitcomb Jr, that
in 1961 launched the modern "creation
science" movement in the
United States. The tracks were promoted
by numerous books (such as
AE Wilder-Smith's Man's Origin,
Man's Destiny in 1965) and films
(Baptist minister Stanley Taylor's
Footprints in Stone, produced with
the help of Henry Morris in 1972).
However, all of the tracks allegedly
made by humans have been discredited
by numerous studies.

The "Burdick Track" was not
Burdick's only major discovery; in
1966, Burdick described his alleged
discovery of pollen from conifers
in Precambrian rocks as "science-shaking
original-pioneering work."
However, this discovery — like the
"Burdick Track" — was later discredited
by scientists; and even
some creationists began to distance
themselves from Burdick's claims.
For example, young-earth creationist Walter Lammerts (1904–1996)
— whose work was also cited in
The Genesis Flood — criticized
Burdick as someone who was
"weak", "slow", and who "has not
kept up with his reading". Unlike
many creationists of his era,
Lammerts supported civil rights
and conservation, abhorred far-right
extremists, and rejected the
claim that communism was based
on evolution. Lammerts's approach
to the evolution controversy was
simple: "If a man is such a stupid
fool he can't see that evolution is
wrong, I'm not going to try to convince him."

The Creation Evidence Museum
also includes a large magenta-windowed
"hyperbaric biosphere" in
which Baugh claims to have recreated
"earth's original pre-flood
environment" (Figure 3).
According to Baugh, the biosphere
— which is connected to an oscilloscope
— increases organisms'
life-spans by 300%; it also detoxifies
copperheads' venom. Near the
biosphere is an aquarium in which
Baugh grows "vegetarian piranhas."
Baugh believes his discoveries support
the vast life-spans of biblical
patriarchs such as Adam (who
allegedly lived to be 930), and the harmonious environment (that is,
no carnivores or death) before Eve
introduced sin into the world.
Baugh hopes to grow dinosaurs in
the biosphere. On the museum's
walls, visitors can view paintings in
which pre-flood children play with
a baby Apatosaurus in the nearby
Paluxy River.Visitors can purchase these replicas, as well as books,
posters, and other materials such as certificates honoring recipients
as "visionaries" for "supporting truth in education."

The dinosaur tracks in Glen
Rose are from the lower
Cretaceous; some of these tracks
that were studied by Roland Bird
are also displayed at the American
Museum of Natural History. The
1500-acre Dinosaur Valley State
Park — a National Natural
Landmark — includes models of a
70' (21 m) Apatosaurus and a 45'
(14 m) Tyrannosaurus rex commissioned
by the Sinclair Oil Company for the New York World's
Fair in 1964–1965 (Figure 4).

About the Author(s):

Randy Moore is coauthor of More
Than Darwin (Berkeley [CA]:
University of California Press, 2009)
and of Chronology of the Evolution-
Creationism Controversy (Westport
[CT]: Greenwood Press, forthcoming in 2010).